This week at CNN, the President and CEO of the Guttmacher Institute, Ann Starrs, in a desperate attempt to save the unpopular and failing Affordable Care Act, repeated the already discredited claim that women will be denied access to contraception if the healthcare law is repealed. Her claim ignores the reality that contraceptives are widely available, and that many reputable medical facilities, including thousands of community health centers across the nation, provide them along with full-service healthcare. Ms. Starrs clearly prioritizes funding the abortion industry over providing comprehensive medical care for women.
Pretending that funding for the nation’s number one abortion provider, Planned Parenthood, equates to healthcare, Starrs criticized AUL by name for its call for real healthcare that respects life for women and for federal funding that supports legitimate, full-service medical facilities providing healthcare to women.
Some important facts she failed to mention:
Abortion industry advocates put “The Con in Contraceptive” by mislabeling life-ending drugs and devices as contraception, when in fact drugs such as ella, intrauterine devices and Plan B can end the life of an unborn child. This was no accident. In fact, Planned Parenthood bragged about its role in getting Obamacare passed, and the mandates that were later issued, including the coercive “HHS Mandate,” were developed by Institute of Medicine panels were stacked with abortion advocates, including some from Guttmacher.
AUL has filed 29 amicus curiae “friend of the court” briefs detailing the life-ending realities of some “contraceptive” drugs and devices that the Affordable Care Act and its “HHS Mandate” force employers to include in their health insurance plans. These established medical facts were twice before the U.S. Supreme Court, when it overturned the “HHS Mandate” as applied to closely held corporations such as Hobby Lobby and when the Court heard a challenge to the Mandate brought by the Little Sisters of the Poor and other religious groups. In fact, Judge Neil Gorsuch, as a judge on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals that heard the Hobby Lobby case, noted in his concurring opinion that the HHS mandate compelled Hobby Lobby to subsidize payment “for drugs or devices that can have the effect of destroying a fertilized human egg.”
That women have many and better options than Planned Parenthood is well known to the abortion industry. According to the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute itself, 90 percent of the 8,409 “safety-net health centers” at which taxpayer-funded family-planning services were provided in 2010 were places other than Planned Parenthood. The vast majority of low-income women obtained subsidized family-planning services at: 3,165 federally qualified health centers, 2,439 health-department clinics, 1,324 other non-Planned Parenthood clinics, and 664 hospitals.
While Planned Parenthood and their former research arm, the Guttmacher Institute, may want to maintain the taxpayer funding intertwined throughout Obamacare, taxpayers don’t need Planned Parenthood. Scarce tax dollars should be directed to the full-service needs of women and their unborn children.
Kristi Hamrick is a media consultant and spokesperson for Americans United for Life.